“All injury’s forgot”: Restoration Sex Comedy and National Amnesia

Why should a foolish marriage vow
     Which long ago was made,
Oblige us to each other now
     When passion is decayed?
We loved, and we loved, as long as we could,
     Till our love was loved out in us both.
But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:
     'Twas pleasure first made it an oath.¹

John Dryden's Marriage à la Mode (1673), one of the first "sex comedies"of the Restoration, opens with the above song presented by Doralice, who has grown bored enough with her husband Rhodophil to consider sleeping with his friend Palamede. This song, in which Doralice questions the obligation to fidelity, might be taken as a rallying cry for the "sex comedy" genre, a loosely defined group of plays, written in the twenty years or so following the Restoration of Charles II, that explores the boundaries of acceptable sexual relations and thus potentially, by extension, analogy, or direct link, challenge traditional authoritarian structures in general.² As Susan Staves has shown, profound skepticism about the foundation of royal authority at this time generated parallel skepticism about traditional forms of familial authority. Both comedies and heroic plays thus often explore the possibility of marriage, like government, as contractual rather than patriarchal, granting women new capacities to choose a husband.³ Certainly, libertine comedies sometimes include such tensions: in Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677), for example, a father's authority gives way to the daughters' individual choices.⁴ Yet in their exploration of libertine sexuality, and not just the individual choice of a marriage partner, these plays raise other issues as well that are not entirely explicable through tensions between Filmerian and Lockean models of authority, or through conflicts between aristocratic and bourgeois ideologies. Political and ideological readings of libertine comedies have tended to focus on the class and gender identities of individual characters, as well as the social forces that those characters engage, confront, and represent.⁵ I want to suggest, however, that reading sex comedies for their representations of family, community, and nation, rather than for the individual gendered and class-related conflicts over freedom and constraint, brings their political force and political anxieties more sharply into focus. Even if she is thinking about herself, Doralice asks a broad philosophical question (why should a marriage vow …) rather than an individual one (why should I …) that, paradoxically, leaves traditional social structures of marriage in place but challenges its presumed foundation, understood in both the Filmerian and Lockean models to rest on fidelity.

The significance and uniqueness of this subset of comedies, then, lies less in their partisanship and more in their philosophical exploration of the proposed erotic foundation of civil society itself. Libertine experimentation does not, as Robert D. Hume reminds us, represent the spirit of the age;⁶ on the contrary, these plays were always controversial. Even at the height of the popularity of libertine drama, attacks on dissolute elite behavior appeared regularly in print. We cannot, then, explain challenges like the one expressed by Doralice by simply presuming a widespread acceptance of libertine behavior in the culture or even in the court.⁷ Instead, we must take it as a genuine inquiry and even a genuine challenge.

In this essay, I will look at two classic libertine comedies, Marriage à la Mode and The Country Wife (1675), with glances at a few others, to revisit the workings of this genre, the challenges the plays propose, and their own strategies for responding to these challenges. Doralice's song does not simply advocate libertine indulgence, but rather introduces an historically specific exploration in the play of what, in this post-revolutionary, post-divine-right, and post-absolutist world, still prevents her and Palamede from sleeping together. Further, the play assumes that a certain number of Palamedes and Doralices will never actually find a good answer to this question and thus considers how the elite class to which its main characters belong can absorb its sexual rebels. Many sex comedies explore similar issues; in fact, we might say that these issues define the genre. Sometimes the...